Read Online Miss Buddha by Ulf Wolf - Free Book Online Page A

to commit to memory his
portion of the Vinaya or the Dhamma. Thus it was that by the end of
the council, the entirety of both the Vinaya and the Dhamma lived
within the memory of not only Upali and Ananda, but of the members
of the council as well, and would from there on be passed down,
monk to monk for over five hundred years before the Dhamma and
Vinaya were finally committed to written Pali.
    Ananda, now satisfied that the Dhamma would
survive, himself lived for another forty years, always available to
be consulted about the Dhamma, always there to reinforce and
strengthen it in the memory of the Sangha.
    He lived to be 120 years old.
     
    But upon his death, he did not follow the
Buddha to the Tusita heaven, not right away. Instead, in order to
do what he could to guard the Dhamma, he chose rebirth instead, and
spent many a lifetime in and around the Indian, Chinese and
Japanese Sangha, never letting on who he was, always helping;
seeing, however, that despite his best efforts, the Dhamma was
gradually altered by embellishment, interpretation, forgetfulness,
and opinion. Also, he himself grew less aware lifetime to
lifetime—for that is the curse of Earth—and in the end, over two
thousand years later, it was only by the help of several Devas that
he finally arrived in the Tusita heaven, only to then find that
Gotama Buddha had just left, and was now back on Earth, wearing
Giordano Bruno.
    Ananda waited a while for Gotama’s return
and then waited some more, but impatient and restless now he soon,
despite the danger, left Tusita again in search of his friend.
     
    For yes, there is definite danger. Earth is
not a light adventure, not a safe place to visit.
    He remembers leaving Tusita in search for
Bruno. He remembers the blue and white of Earth, and approaching
its surface. He remembers being met there by a forest of miasmal
fingers looking for hairline rifts in his armor. He remembers
fighting them off, but they were too many, and too successful and
so managed to enter and to seep him in forgetting, in bright
lusting, in many darknesses. Then he remembers no more.
    So it was that Ananda lost sight, not only
of Gotama Buddha, but of himself.
     
    Finally, on a cold October evening sixty-odd
years ago, he caught a fresh glimpse of the way things are, just as
he was about to enter his current abode: then a soon-to-be-born
male. Catching this glimpse checked him long enough to not enter
that body pre-birth, but to wait and let the blinding pain and its
many forgettings wash over the arriving infant, sans Ananda. Better
that way, oh, so much better.
    :
    And so, in this current life Ananda again
remembered.
    All through those toddler years in northern
Sweden, raised by aging and white-haired (as well as
husbandless—one lost to death, the other to a dash for freedom)
grandmothers as much as by parents. Winters, long and cold at those
latitudes, filled his lungs with clean, crisp air, though also with
the dying screams of another World War just ended, pain still
lingering in the atmosphere, falling like invisible flakes to the
Earth.
    His maternal grandmother feared “The
Russian” more than the Devil, and informed the young Ananda (who
was not named Ananda then, but that is another story) often, and
convincingly, that it was just a matter of time, and not very much
of it, before Sweden was overrun by hungry, baby-eating,
devil-worshipping, mother-and-child raping Russians.
    Ananda used up much salt growing up, many
grains.
    Whatever mysterious dealings kept his
parents in the southern part of the country while he remained up
north eventually sorted themselves out and Ananda was then not so
much collected, as cargoed by train to a waiting mother at
Stockholm station. Four years old then, and bemused. Where was
Gotama? He calculated, by Earth years, Bruno was nearly five
hundred years dead, surely Gotama Buddha was back in Tusita by
now.
     
    When the rules of the Earth were written one
of them said that once you adopt a